THE QUOTE OF THE DAY: "It seems to me a certainty that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of the Arab women are the outstanding causes for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have been developing." -- Gen. George Patton (From Blackfive)

Burchill Lets Loose

Good for Julie Burchill. She's had enough of the Guardian and is going out with phasers on full stun:

If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it's a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban. [The emphasis is redundant]

And, da*m she can write. So read the whole (short) thing. (Hat tip LGF.)

Whew

I thought I was having a bad dream that the liberals were on their way to supporting stoning women for adultery. After all, you would have thought that if there's anything beyond the pale maybe that would qualify. Whoops -- it turns out nothing is too depraved for liberals.

A Reprise To Frost Your Stuffing

At Solovki, one of earliest Gulag camps, Soviet administrators put up a sign that expressed the Communist program: "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness." That slogan captures the murderous nature of the utopian vision of the hard left.

Austin Bay

strikes again:

Klaus, interviewed by the always trenchant Arnaud de Borchgrave, was specifically addressing the EU's failure (for the ninth straight year) to certify its budget. The extensive problems led Klaus to suggest "democratic accountability" can't exist "in anything bigger than a nation state." That's a smart guy's slap at the glazed brains who believe the Brussels government will morph into a superpower utopia of eternal peace and easy prosperity. Frustrating, isn't it, that European intellectuals like Klaus get zip air time with Peter Jennings.

Klaus' comments also have resonance for the United States and the entire "Western world," and not merely in terms of echoing classic democratic propositions like the government that governs best governs least or the more "local" the democratic action the more accountable.

Klaus touches on "the West's" most troublesome strategic weakness: the fat cats' lack of will and courage. The "dream world" of wealth and leisure is dandy as long as someone with courage and competence is policing the real world's vicious nightmares.

The United States didn't sleep during the 1990s. Washington fought a slow war with Saddam. Al Qaeda, however, declared war on the United States, and until 9-11 Washington thought it could keep that war "over there." On 9-11, responsible Americans woke up, though two years on, a predictably irresponsible clan willfully buries its fossil hippie head in pillows.

Klaus recognized the War on Terror implications of his insight when he added: "It is quite normal that the principal targets of Al Qaeda are the U.S. and the U.K., as they have taken the lead to do something about those who launch the terrorist attacks. ... We understand the fragility and vulnerability of today's world, and we know these attacks are coming close to us, but as someone from a small country, I have a tendency to take domestic issues first and then look at the external ones."

Translation: You do what you can do, but recognize the sacrifice of those doing the most.

I love it. "buries its fossil hippie head in pillows". Perfect.

The Memory Hole, X-rayed

Wow. Just plain WOW:

Haynes: Jamie, many of those you speak of live in a different reality from that of the rest of us. Psychologically, they do not see what you see. They see the present and the past through a special lens. What is overwhelmingly clear to them is an imagined future collectivist utopia where antagonisms of class and race have been eliminated, the economic and social inequalities that have driven people to crime have been removed, poverty does not exist and social justice reigns, world brotherhood has replaced war and international strife, and an economy planned by people like them has produced economic abundance without pollution or waste. Coupled with this vision of the future is loathing of the real present which falls woefully short of these goals and hatred for anyone or anything that stands in the way of their illusion of the radiant future.

At Solovki, one of earliest Gulag camps, Soviet administrators put up a sign that expressed the Communist program: "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness." That slogan captures the murderous nature of the utopian vision of the hard left.

Jamie, you look at Soviet history and see the Gulag, the executions of the Terror, the pervasive oppression, and the economic failure. Psychologically, the leftists you speak of see little of that. They see a Communist state that articulated their vision of the future and which sought to destroy the societies and institutions they hated. They cannot see the horror that communism actually created. They look on that horror and see something else because they cannot admit to themselves that their vision is beyond human grasp. The German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, when challenged that thousands of innocents had been sent to the Gulag by Stalin, replied, "the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die." To you or I this remark is disgusting, but to the hard left it reflects their eager willingness to kill any number of persons without concern for innocence or guilt if it might assist in bringing about the socialist future.

The idealized future that has not happened is more real and more important to them than the past that really did happen. Because the imagined future is more real and important to them, they seek to remold history (human understanding of the real past) to the service of the future. In his distopia 1984, George Orwell gives the Ministry of Truth of his totalitarian state the task of rewriting history. Orwell's point was that those who control the politics of the past (history) also control the politics of the present and thereby the future. The academic left, like the Orwell's Engsoc ideologists, believe that history is malleable and can assist in legitimating current politics and bringing about the utopian future.

You will get few mea culpas from hard left academics because they feel no guilt. You think they should regret getting the facts of history wrong. They care not at all about the facts of history, only about the politics of the future. They feel they got the politics right and so no mea culpa is due.

The facts of history that they got wrong can be, in their view, rationalized, redefined, minimized, or otherwise set aside in service to the idealized future they seek. Many have learned no lessons from the failure of communism; they will ardently pursue the same goals by the same means, albeit under new names.

You note the incongruity of hearing historians who are supposed to care about the past dismiss new information from Soviet archives as useless concern for "old ghosts" and "engaging in necrophilia." But those who say such thinks are not really historians, they are propagandists for the future left utopia who camouflage themselves as historians. They are interested in the past only when it can be put to the service of the future they seek. The flood of information out of Communist archives does not serve their goals, thus they define those matters as, as you noted, "ancient" and of no interest. [Emphasis added]

DEFINITELY A READ THE WHOLE THING!

Obscenity of the Day

How depraved and utterly irrelevant have our feminists become when pictures like this are not deplored with non-stop deconstruction and ostracism:



(That possible person on the left in the black bag is supposed to be his wife. But don't worry there's no evidence whatsoever that the person on the right is a HATEFUL MYSOGYNIST. None whatsoever. Come to think of it, I think I'll just go put a black bag over my wife's head right now and see how she reacts. Ugggghhhhh.)

Instead we're supposed to believe that this practice is for the protection of his wife. This is a steaming plate-full of garbage to only be believed by mental midgets.

Our feminists have become utter hypocrites. And collection-plate filling members of the "Church of the Left".

The bottom line is that the radical feminists live in a tinfoil-hat fantasy world imagining hateful oppression by their fellow countryfolk -- and are therefore completely blind to what a real "enemy" looks like. And the enemy has taken double advantage of it by the terrorist tactic of hiding in civilian populations and claiming to be "just another group oppressed by hateful whitey".

No Different Than Pat and Jerry...

Another classic that I managed to miss! Check this out -- I starts out like a blow to the plexus and never relents:

Sometime during the past thirty years, liberalism stopped being a mere political perspective and turned into a religion. I mean that literally. Liberalism now functions for substantial numbers of its adherents as a religion: an encompassing worldview that answers the big questions about life, lends significance to our daily exertions, and provides a rationale for meaningful collective action.

It wasn't supposed to be that way. Liberalism arose as a solution to the destructive religious wars of Europe's past, and succeeded because it allowed people of differing religious perspectives to live peacefully and productively in the same society. Designed to make the world safe for adherents of differing faiths, liberalism itself was never supposed to be a faith. But that is exactly what liberalism has become. And this transformation of liberalism into a de facto religion explains a lot about what we call "political correctness."

Have you ever wondered why conservatives nowadays are so often demonized, even by mainstream liberals? No matter how balanced, well-reasoned, or rooted in long-established principle conservative objections to, say, affirmative action or gay marriage may be, conservatives are still likely to find themselves stigmatized as racist homophobes. By the same token, reasonable conservative ideas are regularly deemed unfit for reasoned debate. This preference for ostracism over engagement amounts to a brilliant strategy on the part of the Left, but the demonization of conservatives can't be explained as a mere conscious tactical maneuver. The stigmatization of conservatives only works because so many people are primed to respond to it in the first place.

So why have conservatives been demonized? Maybe it's because the religion that liberalism has become is so badly in need of demons. Traditional liberalism simply laid out ground rules for reasoned debate and the peaceful adjudication of political differences. One of the main reasons why politics in a liberal society could be peaceful was that people sought direction about life's ultimate purpose outside of politics itself. But once traditional religion ceased to provide modern liberals with either an ultimate life purpose or a pattern of virtue, liberalism itself was the only belief system remaining that could supply these essential elements of life. [Emphasis added, but once more not needed]

Hitchens has pointed out rather eloquently in his "Against Rationalization" the similarities of the radical, pro-Saddam left with the likes of Falwell and Robertson:

But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. [Emphasis added]

So the answer to the question: what happens to the Liberal sheep? ... Lies in plain sight! Kurtz continues:

The young students who now live in "multicultural" theme houses, or who join (or ally themselves with) multicultural campus political organizations are looking for a home, in the deepest sense of that word. In an earlier time, the always difficult and isolating transition from home to college was eased by membership in a fraternity, or by religious fellowship. Nowadays, multicultural theme houses, political action, and related coursework supply what religion and fraternities once did. But if the multicultural venture is truly to take the place of religion, it must invite a student to insert himself into a battle of profound significance. The fight for slave reparations, and the unceasing effort to ferret out examples of "subtle" racism in contemporary society, are techniques for sustaining a crusading spirit by creating the feeling that Simon Legree and Bull Conner are lurking just around the next corner. Conservative opponents of affirmative action or slave reparations simply have to be imagined as monsters. Otherwise the religious flavor of the multiculturalist enterprise falls flat, and the war of good against evil is converted into difficult balancing of competing political principles and goods in which no one is a saint or a devil. [Emphasis added -- but superfluous]

By now you've figured out you need to READ THE WHOLE THING. AND NEEDLESS TO SAY IT JUST GOT ADDED TO THE CLASSIC LINKS RIGHT YONDER...

MORE EURO NIRVANA:

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Europeans are living in a "dream world" of welfare and long vacations and have yet to realize "they are not moving toward some sort of nirvana."
The Czech Republic is a candidate for European Union membership, but Mr. Klaus, who was elected president in February, made clear in an interview his distaste for the organization.

...

EU auditors could vouch for only 10 percent of the $120 billion the bloc spent in 2002. It was the ninth successive year the auditors were unable to certify the budget as a whole.
Europeans have not yet faced up to such "serious underlying issues," Mr. Klaus said, because "they are still in the dream world of welfare, long vacations, guaranteed high pensions and cradle-to-grave social security."

More Hateful Garbage

Brian Anderson has a masterful evisceration of the recent companion volume to Mien Kampf that goes by the title of "Empire". My sincerest of apologies to Brian for not finding this sooner -- it was published in early 2002 but stands as a timeless classic.

The stuff of "Empire" is the penultimate icon of what can only be described using Hitchens' phrase "hateful garbage". Those moderates on the left either really don't understand what they're standing shoulder to shoulder with or need to re-examine their premises and friendships -- and they can do it none too soon:

Apolitical abstraction and wild–eyed utopianism, a terroristic approach to political argument, hatred for flesh and blood human beings, nihilism: Empire is a poisonous brew of bad ideas. It belongs with Mein Kampf in the library of political madness.

Do Empire’s many fans really believe their own praise? Does Time really think it’s “smart” to call for the eradication of private property, celebrate revolutionary violence, whitewash totalitarianism, and pour contempt on the genuine achievements of liberal democracies and capitalist economics? Would Frederic Jameson like to give up his big salary at Duke? To ask such questions is to answer them. The far left’s pleasure is in the adolescent thrill of perpetual rebellion. Too many who should know better refuse to grow up. The ghost of Marx haunts us still.

For all its infantilism, the kind of hatred Hardt and Negri express for our flawed but decent democratic capitalist institutions—the best political and economic arrangements man has yet devised and the outcome of centuries of difficult trial and error—is dangerous, especially since it’s so common in the university and media. It seems to support Islamist revolutionary hopes, the increasingly violent anti–globalization movement, and kindred political lunacies. September 11 has reminded us of the fragility of our freedom and prosperity. But the continued influence of the far left, which some mistakenly dismiss as inconsequential, can weaken our collective will to protect ourselves from our enemies. Why fight for a political and social order that is so contemptible?

The journalist Andrew Sullivan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, argued that one consequence of September 11’s terrorist assault will be to discredit permanently the views of those who, like Hardt and Negri, despise democratic capitalism every bit as much as the Taliban does. I hope he’s right, but I’m not so optimistic. After all, Empire is the “Next Big Idea” after a century in which more than 125 million people lost their lives because of antibourgeois political movements. A few thousand murdered Americans may not be enough to end the hold the radical left still has on elite culture. [Emphasis pointlessly added.]

And no closing comments necessary. READ THE WHOLE THING, IT JUST GOT ADDED TO MY CLASSICS LINKS.

Hitchens on the Turkish Synagogue Bombings

Sit down -- you'll need to. You will read this but here's the closer lest there be any chance whatsoever of you missing it. For this is what a true master of reality can visit upon brainwashed midgets:

In a way, this effort doesn't quite meet the standard of moral cretinism that I had suggested. It actually fails to make any link at all between the actions of the murderers and the policy of Bush and Blair. Rather, it simply assumes that the victims are to have their deaths attributed in this fashion. The prevalence of this assumption, along with its facile appearance in the pages of a great liberal newspaper, is something worth noting.

As the author undoubtedly knows—she elsewhere demonstrates some knowledge of Turkish Jewry—and as I reminded readers yesterday, the Neve Shalom synagogue has been lethally attacked before. The last occasion was in the late 1980s. At that time, the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher governments had for some years taken a pro-Saddam Hussein "tilt" in the Iran-Iraq war. I can't remember what the excuse of the Jew-killers was on that previous occasion, but it most certainly wasn't their hatred for regime change. Maybe they didn't come up with an excuse, imagining that the action spoke for itself. Anyway, why bother with a justification when there are so many peace-loving and progressive types willing to volunteer to make the excuses for you? [Emphasis added, but once more not needed]

Thanks Chris. Pour me another one soon.

The Americans Love Pepsi-Cola

Mark Steyn knocks another one out of the park:

If you're so inclined, you can spend the week listening to long speeches by George Galloway and Harold Pinter. Or you can cut to the chase and get the message from Maulana Inyadullah. In late September 2001 Mr Inyadullah was holed up in Peshawar awaiting the call to arms against the Great Satan and offered this pithy soundbite to the Telegraph's David Blair:

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death."

That's it in a nutshell - or in a nut's hell. And, like Mr Inyadullah, if it's Pepsi or death, the fellows on the streets of London this week choose death - at least for the Iraqis. If it's a choice between letting some carbonated-beverage crony of Dick Cheney get a piece of the Nasariyah soft-drinks market or allowing Saddam to go on feeding his subjects feet-first into the industrial shredder for another decade or three, then the "peace" activists will take the lesser of two evils - ie, crank up the shredder. Better yet, end UN sanctions so Saddam can replace the older, less reliable shredders, the ones with too many bits of bone tissue jammed in the cogs.

...

The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it's too imperialist.

...

Two years ago, NBC held a discussion on the growing alienation of the Muslim world: the al-Munaif family who, after the Kuwaiti liberation, had "slaughtered sheep in tribute to one President Bush", were now disenchanted and had named their newborn son "Osama". While the Arabists on the NBC panel chewed over the problem thoughtfully, on this page I was more insouciant: there's no point trying to figure out which way a guy who sacrifices sheep will jump. That's the way I feel about this week's polls and protests. The Min of Ag has already sacrificed all the sheep, but, that detail aside, much of Britain is now about as rational on America as the al-Munaif family. My advice to Bush is: make sure you know where the exit is and try to avoid eye contact. [Emphasis added -- but not needed for the sane human]

Weeeehaawww! Go Mark! And you go read the whole thing.

MORE ON DE-NIHILISM:

Not even the Romans faced such an enemy, through centuries of patrolling their most distant frontiers; and probably no other people previously encountered nihilism in so extreme a form. An enemy for whom the "suicide bomb" is not even a weapon, but an aesthetic gesture. Whose only purpose is to advance Armageddon. And who captures the imagination of the young.

We couldn't surrender, even if we wanted to. We must instead find new ways to fight. [Emphasis added]

David Warren keeps earning his link. The Left wants us to surrender. The great irony is that the harder they fight for surrender, the greater the catastrophe we will be required to inflict on the enemy in proportion to that which they will be allowed to inflict on us. If the hard left were actually people of rational good will instead of the nihilist heirs of Kant and Stalin, they would be able to understand this truth...

Miles to Go Before He Sleeps -- Welcome!

A beautiful followup over at Spock's. This from a Spaniard after reading DenBeste's article about the US being a Non-European country:

Now the thing is, that all this time I have felt as if I was "in the wrong place". Being the only one with one idea, while virtually all the people around me (in fact, all the europeans) is against it, makes me feel as if I was not from there. But then, if not Catalan, Spanish or European, what am I???

I haven't had the complete answer to this question until today, when I read your article. Now I do know it.

I'm American. In the wrong place, far from home, but American.

Welcome brother! Get on the boat like my ancestors! As Spock says in the same article "It is more important what you stand for than who you stand with."

But don't get complacent; our leftists are far down the road to an "It's not cool to be smart" culture. In fact, let me buy your plane ticket -- we need you!

But No Complaints About Auschwitz

This is just fascinating. The Red Cross, bombed by terrorists, thinks the U.S. remains the font of all evil and feels sorry for the terrorists. Here's a commentary that starts to put it in perspective:

The continuing detention of captured al Qaeda and Taliban members at Guantanamo is fast becoming the favored cause of international activists opposed to the aggressive prosecution of the war on terror. Even the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has traditionally maintained "neutrality" on such questions (declining even to publicly criticize the Third Reich's death camps during World War II), recently attacked the U.S. for failing to establish a timetable for trying, or freeing, the Guantanamo detainees. A few points should be made in defense of the administration's policy.

The ICRC's primary complaint is that "after more than 18 months of captivity, the internees still have no idea about their fate." As the ICRC knows very well, this is the case with respect to all captured enemy combatants in every war. The laws of war permit such individuals to be held for the entire duration of the conflict--primarily to ensure that they cannot rejoin the fight. Contrary to the claims of the ICRC, other activist groups and even some U.S. allies, the detainees are not being held "indefinitely." The length of their confinement is purely a function of how long the war lasts. The administration's critics might reflect how Churchill would have reacted if, during the Battle of Britain, the ICRC had asked him how long his Axis prisoners would be held. [Emphasis added]

Oh I forgot -- there was no Holocaust. And no Auschwitz you liar! That's hate speech to impugn Hitler's reputation. He's just misunderstood! Yeah, that's it. Burn down a few more Holocaust museums and there'll be no more proof. Jooooos go to Palestine! No wait -- JOOOOOOS OUT OF PALESTINE! The JOOOOOOS are Nazis! No wait, the Nazis were misunderstood... [Ed: You should be starting to understand who the real intellectual midgets are by now.]

WHO SAID THIS?

George Bush blew that war. I think he'd had only 300 Americans killed and I think he felt at the end of the war that day, it would be a great record. So he didn't want to go on one more day. If he'd gone on one more day there might not have been 100,000 Iraqi killed. But in any event, war is merely one of the horrors that face us. If you're going to take an absolute liberal position, as for instance Victor did, and said let's do it through the UN, the fact of the matter is the UN is not competent to find out where all the nuclear things are buried. We're going to miss the KGB before it's all over because they were good at that. The CIA is probably pretty good at that. You need that kind of information.
We're entering an extraordinary world where all the old signals are off. It used to be that Third World countries were wonderful little places that were terribly exploited. Now they're ugly places that are run by maniacs very often. We have to face that fact. If you keep using liberal jargon forever you will finally die in your own platitudes.

Now click through to see a near jaw-dropper...

Andrew has an interesting insight on who Bush really is. Here's the snip from a reader's letter:

"While I was in architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin, one of my professors was the actual architect for George W. Bush's new ranch at Crawford. He showed photograph of its construction on a weekly basis during his lectures and had declared that the "governor" (as Bush was at the time) and his wife were the most pleasant and thoughtful clients he had ever had. He would recount stories of how Bush would form friendly and close rapports with him and other associated designers, in spite of their opposite political (and sexual) persuasions. George and Laura would host intimate dinners for my professor and he came away convinced of their capacity for warmth and understanding. My professor credits his ability to employ 'green' building techniques on the ranch to the Bush's willingness to listen. He was distinctly fond of Laura, who would call him every time he drove back from his site visits to see if he was okay. He admitted to his students that he came into the project as a skeptic, but came away as a grateful friend."

He clearly must have been brainwashed by Dick Cheney...

Europe Then -- And Now and Then and Now

David Warren is scorching with "Bush in London". Here's the warm-up uppercut:

Kraemer grasped that it takes more than superior man- and firepower to defeat an enemy that is ideologically driven; that geostrategic contests are determined as much by irrational and immaterial factors. He grasped that the great weakness of the United States and the West, after the defeat of Nazism, was identical with the great weakness of Germany that had allowed the rise of Hitler. In each case, it is the existence of an intellectual elite who think about abstractions instead of realities, and whose instinct to appease a mortal enemy is founded in a lazy, cowardly, and conceited moral relativism. Kraemer was father to the phrase, "provocative weakness" -- in two words, the reason why the West is under attack today from such terror networks as Al Qaeda.

And while you're smarting from that one, you aren't looking for the roundhouse right that puts you on your knees:

In their own subjective world of illusions, the demonstrators demand not surrender, but an unobtainable "peace". However, in the objective world of cause and effect, they are the reliable allies of the people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Centre, who blow up Jews in synagogues and supermarkets, who tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves.

The connexion between present and past was well-made in an e-mail forwarded to me, from an American Jew, returning from holiday in Europe. He wrote that, "When my grandfather left Europe in 1937, the graffiti on the walls read, 'Jews go to Palestine'. Today the graffiti reads, 'Jews out of Palestine'. How soon Europe forgets." [Emphasis added]

When you get up off the floor we'll chat more about the unassailable moral superiority of Europe... READ THE WHOLE THING -- AND WARREN JUST GOT ADDED TO MY LINKS. (Perhaps you're thinking you should brush up again on residues? Don't let me slow you down... ;)

Melanie Phillips on blaming the victims. We can only be a stone's throw away from dismantling our police as well. After all, everyone knows that the violence of disarming criminals can only create more criminals -- we absolutely MUST break this cycle of violence you see...

Lileks on the Press and Play-Doh Mania

It's another "why can't I write like that" day at Lilek's place:

You know what? Michael Moore is right. There are many Americans who are ignorant of the world around them. And they’re all TV news producers. Two big bombs in Istanbul, and what’s the big story of the day? Following around a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh as he turns himself into the police. I was stunned to discover last night that Nightline not only covered the Jackson case in detail, but bumped coverage of the Whitehall speech, which was the most important speech since the Iraq campaign began and arguably the most important speech of the war, period.

Oh brother. And that's just the warm-up -- wait til you get to his take on Salam Pax!

Attacking the Baggage Train

Nice post at the Belmont Club on how the two civil wars work together as the world war. First the simple remedial history lesson:

Al Qaeda did what desert raiders have always done when facing a militarily superior enemy. They attacked the baggage train.

Then the ending with a real wallop:

In Coppola's classic film, Apocalypse Now, the character Colonel Kurtz described how his A-Team had at first gone the rounds of mountain villages, inoculating the children against disease and providing medical treatment for the sick in an effort to win hearts and minds, only to find, upon their return that the Communists had lopped off the arms of each and every child who had received a vaccination. Kurtz was struck 'like a silver bullet' by the realization that the Communists weren't challenging his military capability to defeat them; they were challenging his will to win.

The will to resist evil is the most fragile commodity in the West. It is a flame burned so low that Al Qaeda thinks that one strong blast of wind will extinguish it forever. It flickers so feebly that one American Presidential election or a single battlefield catastrophe could set the stage for the embrace of a thousand years of darkness, the darkness that Europe has been longing for this past century. The 'peace demonstrators' in London last week suggested not so much Trafalgar Square in the heart of modern Europe as ancient Gadara.

When He came to the other side into the country of the Gadarenes, two men who were demon-possessed ... were so extremely violent that no one could pass by that way ... And He was asking him, "What is your name?" ... "My name is Legion; for we are many." And they cried out, saying, "What business do we have with each other...? Have You come here to torment us before the time?" Now there was a large herd of swine feeding nearby on the mountain. The demons implored Him, saying, "Send us into the swine so that we may enter them." And coming out, the unclean spirits entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank ... and they were drowned in the sea.

The precipice has beckoned to four successive generations in the West; and now yet another master calls them sweetly to the dark. [Emphasis added.]

This is some nice writing! His "calls them sweetly to the dark" really just slices through the fog.

And his "darkness that Europe has been longing for this past century" harkens me back to Pascal Bruckner's "Europe: Remorse and Exhaustion". WOW. READ THE WHOLE THING.

Follow the link to bizarro world ... where no courtesy you can pay your enemy goes without demands for even more ... wouldn't want to hurt their feelings you know. After all, that bombing of the Red Cross was really just a cry for help!

A Letter on West

The following letter appeared in the local paper and stands by itself pretty well I think. By today's politically correct incoherence, if we had captured Hitler in WWII we would not have been allowed to call him names for fear of hurting his feelings and stunting his ability to be considered for a chair of "Peace Studies" at Harvard. I'll stop before I tell you what I really think.

West's tactics are justified
By Stanley Kass

This letter concerns a tragedy called Lt. Col. Allan West. I was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, WWII. After the jump in Normandy, the Germans we captured were reluctant to give us any information, even with intense questioning.

And, being GIs we could understand why. To get them talking, we had to use extraordinary measures.

I don't intend to discuss what we had to do, but it wasn't easy to watch. They talked.

Such is the case of Lt. Col. West, who was questioning an Iraqi policeman who knew quite a bit about the terrorist situation but would not talk. West knew he had to create a situation to force the issue. He fired a shot over the policeman's head, which was enough to get him to talk.

He eventually learned enough where he knew it would save American lives. Because of the shot he fired in the air, it is said that he may be court martialed.

I wish the best for his family for what they are going through.

Stanley Kass,
Fort Collins

A steal from Andrew in the "First they came for the Jews" department:

MEANWHILE, IN FRANCE: "The Chief Rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, called on that country's Jewish community to wear baseball caps instead of skullcaps while not in their homes, in order 'to prevent being attacked in the street.' Daily newspaper Le Parisien reported in its Wednesday edition that Sitruk made the comments Tuesday in an interview on Radio Shalom, a Jewish community radio station." It gets worse, doesn't it?

Ah, those sophisticated Europeans. Well, we were "sophisticated" enough not to punish the Nazis and their French collaborators in even a shadow of what we should have wrought. And now the Jews pay the price once more. Pathetic.

Spock is Rolling in Residues

Go read it:

Sometimes when the status quo is intolerable, the best answer is to chuck everything and strike out into the wilderness. If life in the slums of Europe is terrible, the best answer may be to save enough money for a steamship ticket and move to a strange land across the ocean, where they speak a strange language but where there's more opportunity. The great wave of immigration in the sixty years after the American Civil War was a filter; those who said, "It might be better!" were more likely to go than those who said, "It might be worse!"

Achievement builds confidence, and failure erodes it. The 20th century was far more kind to America than it was to Europe. America faced its challenges with a can-do attitude and generally triumphed, while Europe was devastated by two world wars and was the front line in a third (the Cold War), and became increasingly risk-averse. By the mid 1960's most of Europe had achieved a reasonably comfortable life, and the fixation was less on how it could be further improved as on how it might end up getting worse again.

Or, at least, "Old Europe" thought that way. The nations which were part of the Soviet empire during the Cold War, Rumsfeld's "New Europe", have been far more eager to take chances and embrace new ideas because their Stalinist alternative had been pretty crummy. [Emphasis added.]

I couldn't be prouder to be descended from people who got on the boats! And go back and ponder residues again...

There's a mandatory history lesson over at the Counterrevolutionary. No excuses allowed. We're talking jaw dropper territory here... (Hat tip Instapundit.)

Case Opened Wider

Whoops reprise:

The Newsweek authors also cite an unnamed "U.S. official" who claims that the intelligence in the memo was selectively presented and "contradicted by other things." To support this argument, Isikoff and Hosenball cite a late 1998 trip to Afghanistan by Faruq Hijazi. Hijazi served Saddam Hussein both as deputy director of Iraqi intelligence and later as ambassador to Turkey. At that meeting, the authors contend, bin Laden rejected an Iraqi offer of asylum. Their source is Vince Cannistraro, a knowledgeable former CIA counterterrorism official--the kind of expert whose views should be taken very seriously. He may be right. And if his understanding of the meeting's outcome is accurate, that information certainly should have been included in the Feith memo.

But stop for a moment and consider what this analysis means. It demonstrates that at the very least, Saddam Hussein was willing to give Osama bin Laden asylum in Iraq. Is this not precisely the kind of collusion the administration cited as it made its case for war? If such a distinguished skeptic of the links believes that Saddam Hussein would have offered bin Laden asylum, why is it so hard to believe--to take one example from a "well-placed source" cited in the Feith memo--that Hussein sent his intelligence director to bin Laden's farm in 1996 to train the al Qaeda leader in explosives? Or, to take another from a "regular and reliable source" mentioned in the memo, that bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, "visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998"? [Emphasis added.]

Oh BROTHER. Nope, where there's smoke there can be no fire. Absolutely, positively not. Just ask the Californians ;)

Spock on Telegraphy

I'm sure you're still scratching your head about "Bodyguard of Lies". Well Spock has finally lined himself up in my corner: "Telegraphing Your Punches".

Well, of course his piece is meatier because he's -- well -- Spock! And sorry for being so late linking to this!

Humiliation -- Solved At Last

This is just beyond incisive by light-years -- or more... (Hat Tip Roger L. Simon)

FBI's Atta Ass Ablutions Spotted In Prague

Don't worry, there is no evidence whatsoever here that the FBI and CIA are trying to cover their asses about 911. And absolutely, positively no possibility that Saddam is linked to 911. Absolutely positively not. None whatsoever. Iron clad shut and closed case. No sane person would suspect such a thing -- unless they actually had a brain:

The Czechs reviewing these visits in retrospect further assumed that Atta's business in Prague was somehow related to his activities in the United States, given that large sums of laundered funds began to flow to the 9/11 conspiracy in June 2000, after Atta left Prague. Even more ominous, if the BIS's subsequent identification of Atta in Prague was accurate, then some part of the mechanism behind the activities of hijacker-terrorists may have been based in Prague at least until mid April 2001.

Czech intelligence services could not solve this puzzle without access to crucial information about Atta's movements in the United States, Germany, and other countries in which the plot unfolded, but it soon became clear that such cooperation would not be forthcoming. Even after al-Ani was taken prisoner by U.S. forces in Iraq in July 2003 and presumably questioned about Atta, no report was furnished to the Czech side of the investigation. "It was anything but a two-way street," a top Czech government official overseeing the case explained. "The FBI wanted complete control. The FBI agents provided us with nothing from their side of the investigation."

Without those missing pieces -- including cell phone logs, credit card charges, and interrogation records in the FBI's possession -- the jigsaw puzzle remains incomplete. [Emphasis added.]

Oh, and the major media apparently can't find their asses with both hands tied behind their back. But I speak only as an observer with a pulse. YOU NEED TO READ THIS STORY.

There You Go Again...

More clearly simpleton nonsense from a hateful warmonger:

Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to change in our own thinking. In the West, there's been a certain skepticism about the capacity or even the desire of Middle Eastern peoples for self-government. We're told that Islam is somehow inconsistent with a democratic culture. Yet more than half of the world's Muslims are today contributing citizens in democratic societies. It is suggested that the poor, in their daily struggles, care little for self-government. Yet the poor, especially, need the power of democracy to defend themselves against corrupt elites.

Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it. (Applause.)

We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found. (Applause.) [Emphasis added.]

Good thing Bush's critics don't actually listen and ponder or they'd realize the little canary in their brain had long ago been exterminated in their own internal Auschwitz. I'm beginning to realize why the hard leftists are such fans of rehabilitation at all costs -- they secretly realize the need to avail themselves of it...

Sitcom Nation?

I have a new writer to watch:

Every experienced strategist understands warfare is, at its most basic level, a clash of human wills. The motive will of a man who spends years preparing to smash a jet into a skyscraper is large in big letters. His cohorts are betting that America is a sitcom nation with a short attention span. We'll change channels, cut and run.

Mature Americans recognize that everyone has a leadership role, especially in times of crisis. The cooperation and common trust demonstrated by Americans evacuating the World Trade Center not only saved thousands of lives, it was indicative of America's capacity for individual leadership.

Self-critique is one thing, the acid of self-doubt spurred by lies is something else. It's time for every American to be a leader, to bury these lies -- from unilateralism, to quagmire, to "no one told us" -- and get on with the hard business of winning the War on Terror. [Emphasis added.]

As a parent, I feel more and more like a -- ummm, well -- parent. And if you think that means leadership by example of cynicism, self-immolation and doubt -- it ain't happening here...

Jews Into The Memory Hole

And now it starts here. Time to repeat again I see:

First They Came for the Jews

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

First, the history of the Jews will need to be destroyed and obscured. After all, wasn't it all the Jews fault? And did the Holocaust really happen? Isn't that a big lie from the Jews? And weren't all the American soldiers who saw the death camps really Jews themselves since Joooos control the United States, so they lied about it? And wasn't Mein Kampf really a book about tolerance and understanding that has been smeared by the Jooooooooooos?

And by then the killings will be rampant -- like they are not far from being in Europe today...

Good Reporting Corroborated, Irony Abounds

Speaking about Kindergarten lessons, P.J. O'Rourke has an interview in the Atlantic about his upcoming piece on Iraq. Check out this snippet:

One example of the kind of reporting that O'Rourke favors is his account of a trip organized by the Kuwait Ministry of Information (part of the Department of Moral Guidance, he notes), during which he covered the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society's distribution of food in Safwan, Iraq, just across the Kuwait border. He watched the chaos that ensued from the top of the aid truck:

There was no reason for people to clobber one another. Even assuming that each man in the riot—and each boy—was the head of a family, and assuming the family was huge, there was enough food in the truck. Mohammed al-Kandari, a doctor from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society, had explained this to the Iraqis when the trailer arrived.... Al-Kandari had persuaded the Iraqis to form ranks. They looked patient and grateful, the way we privately imagine the recipients of food donations looking when we're writing checks to charities. Then the trailer was opened, and everything went to hell.

Most of us have never considered that kindergarten's most important lesson—that of lining up—is somehow related to our society's ability to self-govern. For O'Rourke, the mad dash for food in Safwan represented something more than hunger or desperation:

Aid seekers in England would queue automatically by needs, disabled war vets and nursing mothers first. Americans would bring lawn chairs and sleeping bags, camp out the night before, and sell their places to the highest bidders. Japanese would text-message one another, creating virtual formations, getting in line to get in line. Germans would await commands from a local official, such as the undersupervisor of the town clock. Even Italians know how to line up, albeit in an ebullient wedge. The happier parts of the world have capacities for self-organization so fundamental and obvious that they appear to be the pillars of civilization ... But here—on the road to Ur, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley ... nothing was supporting the roof.

Now check out this snippet I caught on the web where someone was reporting what he found from a soldier just back from Iraq:

And I am not the greatest narrator or storyteller so much of this is just going to be rambling but you should get the jist of it. First off, I guess I should clue others in that my boy (no, not my son SA :-) ) had just came in Satuday from Iraq and I went over there to shoot the sh*t with him. One of the first things he said to me was how f’ed up the Iraqis over there are. They do not understand civility or rules or kindness, just abuse and total authority over them. He said it was like babysitting whenever he had to work with them. Don’t get me wrong, there were some that understood more than others, but as a whole they are selfish and undisciplined without any sense of community. Also, they lacked common sense. An example of this is when they filled propane tanks for the Iraqi citizens, they couldn’t let it be known where it would be until a couple minutes before hand because of the scrambling of everyone to get theirs first. They even had to put concertina up and form a male and female line so that they can have some semblance of organization in the whole process. Inevitably some people would try to jump ahead in line and that is where the Army would show the Iraqis what a hammer toss is, using their tank as the hammer. Back of the line son !

What the libs don't get is that the precise reason why we may not succeed is the precise reason why we have to! (Since when has the world become an irony-free zone?) You can't let these people have nukes -- they'll put the big red button on their car hood as a bragging right; and then wonder what went wrong when they parked under the coconut tree. And that's the ones who aren't viciously brainwashed to be insane killers. (And irony of ironies, I have great sympathy for the Iraqis and actually believe that they are one of our best hopes to snap out of it due to the very brutality of Saddam's oppression. Check out Healing Iraq, for instance.)

Which leads to the real money quote from the O'Rourke interview:

In your last interview for The Atlantic you mentioned that Chris Buckley and Dave Barry are good friends of yours. What would happen if we locked the three of you in a room—with drinks and cigars, of course—and told you to solve the problems of the Middle East?

First of all, it better be a lot of cigars and a lot of beer! An awful lot of beer, because we're going to be in there for a long, long time. The problems of the Middle East are the problems of mankind since we came out of the trees. They just happen to be a little more intense. When you look at a chaotic region like the Middle East, what you're really seeing is most of human history, and some parts of America and some parts of Europe and a few parts of Asia are glaring exceptions. The kind of peaceful, productive, incredibly wealthy life that we live in these few areas around the world—this has only been going on for a nanosecond as time goes. It's so exceptional I'm not even sure what it means. The whole world might degenerate back into the Middle East, because that's what it's always been. And you can't solve the problem of the Middle East, because it's not a problem, it's a condition. It's the normal condition of mankind.

If you read Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War, it's all there. It's been going on like this, time out of mind. Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.

So we shouldn't be trying to make sense out of it?

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can. Do the right thing and be brave and it will never get any better.

There's lots to chew on here, no? The idea that the West can just sit around and have parlor conversations about cricket with barbarians is just the West's "fantasy ideology" to pair up with Al Qaeda's that Allah will make them victorious in the face of an opponent they can barely comprehend. And the real irony here is that implementing the Western Leftist's fantasy world of preemptive surrender is the only plausible way that Al Qaeda's fantasy can happen.

For the unspoken truth is what everyone knows with a moment's reflection -- if the West were actually as evil as Noam Chomsky thunders, then the Muslim world would have long since been rendered as a sea of human lampshades. For that's what the real Hitler did without remorse.

We are once again driven by our enlightenment values to risk our lives and our futures hoping against the clock that measured battle can once again come from behind and defeat the latest barbarism at a price we can pay without overwhelming tears. For if our children's futures clearly become the center of the stakes, as finally became clear in the struggle with Japan, history shows that science and logic continually provide us new tools that ignorant barbarity cannot even imagine...

Andrew nails the Euro-Left and Saddam:

But the alliance between the anti-globalization left and Islamo-fascism is a natural one. It will grow and deepen. They share a hatred of Western freedom, a deep anti-Semitism and implacable hostility to capitalism. The alliance is as predictable as, oh, say that between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. [Emphasis added.]

Bullseye. And I thought Hawaiian Good Luck couldn't be topped today ;)

"Hawaiian Good Luck" To The AP

Look at this picture. Why is it that the meaning is perfectly clear but the AP photographer doesn't get it? Any bets that the photographer is one of those proclaiming Bush to be stupid -- and has just been devastatingly humiliated by one of Bush's "stupid" minions?



If you don't get it yourself then read this -- which is of course now part of US soldier's counter-interrogation training.

The thing that amazes me most about people that go around calling other people stupid is that they haven't even learned the fundamental lessons of the elementary school playground. When shouting erupts about somebody being stupid, nine times out of ten the shouter is the troublemaker -- and likely the stupid one.

Bush is actually driving the loony left into a tizzy using nothing more than elementary school wisdom. Of course, he's a lot smarter than he lets on -- but with opponents like these he doesn't need to be. You can't make this stuff up! (Hat tip LGF)

Just a Little Item To Close out Sunday...

How could I start a Sunday with the Ten Commandments without closing it with what every Christian must hold dear? But maybe not quite what you expected -- after all, that religion stuff clouds the mind, right? Unmoderated and untethered from logic and nature -- yes. But the same can be said for atheism -- have you somehow managed to forget Hitler, Stalin and Mao? And has Kant's nihilism possibly had a hand in it?

(Large gap follows -- God apparently put a bug in Blogger for dramatic effect ;)

The Lord's Prayer
Our Father	Our Creator
Which Art in Heaven	Who is Our Cause
Hallowed Be Thy Name	Perfect Good is Your Nature
Thy Kingdom Come Thy Will Be Done on Earth as it is in Heaven	Guide Me to Help Implement Your Will on Earth
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread	Help Me to Live In and Realize the Present
and Forgive Us Our Trespasses, as We Forgive Those That Trespass Against Us	Forgive My Errors While Helping Me to Understand We are All One Family and Free Me from Resentment of Others
And Lead Us Not into Temptation, But Deliver Us from Evil	Help Me Responsibly Meet Increasing Challenges
For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power and the Glory For Ever and Ever	Your Power and Bliss are Everywhere and Forever
Amen	And It Will Remain So
Bob's Interpretation Heavily Influenced by Emmet Fox

Interesting, there's that avoidance of resentment and mean-spiritedness thing again -- I wonder why that keeps showing up???

Burns on a Burn

Andrew has a great summary and analysis of John Burns' most recent piece on Iraq. It's mandatory that you at least read Andrew's very short take, but I strongly recommend reading Burns himself, it's not that long and captures lots of nuance.

By the way, Burns is one of the few in the media with the guts and integrity to actually expose corruption in the media themselves. THIS IS ONE READ YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS -- AND LEAVES LITTLE WONDER WHY THE MEDIA BURIED IT!

And check out this one from Keith on the "reversal of roles" of the libs and conservatives!

The Analphilosopher is Hot This Weekend!

Speaking of the libs, here's Keith Burgess-Jackson on "Turning Back the Clock":

I'm not taking sides here. I'm trying to understand liberal discourse and tactics. Liberals, for all their vaunted talk about freedom of expression, don't want a robust debate on issues such as privacy, affirmative action, and redistributive taxation. They are true believers--dogmatists--who view opposition to their views and values as malice, ignorance, or stupidity rather than as a reflection of honest and respectable disagreement. In short, liberals have become totalitarians. Whatever happened to the liberal ideal of a free and open debate on issues that matter? Whatever happened to the marketplace of ideas? Conservatives, as such, aren't malicious, ignorant, or stupid; they have a different vision of the just society. They do not share the liberal view that things have gotten morally better. If the concept of moral progress makes sense, then so does its opposite, moral regress. Progress is in the eye of the beholder.

I said at the outset that I was once a welfare-state liberal. Everyone should be, at different times, a liberal and a conservative. When you're immersed in an ideology such as liberalism, you come to take its principles for granted. You cease interrogating them. You stop thinking, questioning, and examining. If and when you leave the ideology, you see it in a different light. You gain the detachment that allows you to see what was previously invisible. You lose your blinders. I've been inside and outside the liberal circle. I believe this gives me an epistemically privileged vantage point. How many liberals were at one time conservatives? I'm not asking you to accept what I say on authority. I'm asking you to think things through for yourself, Socratically. After all, the unexamined life is not worth living.

It's relatively short -- READ THE WHOLE THING. KEITH HAS JUST EARNED A SPOT ON MY LINKS.

As someone who grew up with a staunchly conservative father and a strongly liberal mother, I also have a bit of perspective on this matter. To accuse either of them of being corrupt or mean-spirited would be just risible. They were (Dad) and are (Mom) two of the nicest people in the world.

Most people in this country are of generally good will. Look around you -- to believe that we could achieve the level of prosperity and cooperation we have by being a herd of mean-spirited morons just brings tears of laughter to my eyes.

Belmont Club has an interesting article on the "Jihadi Air Defense".

The Ten Commandments and Ancient History

This being Sunday, I thought I'd post what my wife took to Sunday School today to teach her pre-schoolers:

The Ten
Commandments
1. You must not worship any other gods.
2. You must not make any idols or images to worship.
3. You must not use my name wrongfully.
4. You must not work on the Sabbath day.
5. You must honor your father and mother.
6. You must not kill.
7. You must not take someone else's husband or wife.
8. You must not steal.
9. You must not accuse anyone unjustly.
10. You must not covet things that belong to other people..

Remind me again why they are so hated by liberals? If you give them a moment's thought you realize that it's only the last six that are the "meat of implementation" -- the first four serve as operational glue and binding if you will. If we leave aside the first four for now, which are constantly and egregiously violated by liberals -- not to even mention conservatives -- I find it interesting that there's a particular lib (and socialist for that matter) focus on 9 and 10.

[UPDATE: Of course, as a one-time atheist myself, what I meant to say about the first 4 is that they will be violated as a matter of course by all non-Jews and non-Christians; I'm pointing out that the last six are candidates for achieving a "universal" applicability. Another context to think of this in is the recent quote from Thomas Friedman about Bush something to the effect of "just because George Bush believes it doesn't necessarily make it wrong". Are libs really ready to go so far as to claim that murder must be right just because Christians believe it's wrong? I never in my wildest dreams could have believed we could reach such a point -- but maybe the mass murder of Christians for being "too stupid" is becoming conceivable after all? And scroll up to check out my comments on the latest from the AnalPhilosopher!]

I believe there's a method to the madness and I'm going to be spending some words on it in the future.

To expand the vein of ancient wisdom, the libs have also buried and reviled the cardinal Greek virtues of moderation, courage, justice and wisdom. I believe this is also no mistake.

The most hilarious recent anecdote on the subject of classicism occured at a recent DC lecture by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian. Upon the introduction of VDH as a classicist, one of Nancy Pelosi's staffer's jumped up and left shouting words to the effect that he wasn't going to be hanging around to listen to any "classist"! The very descriptor, much less the effective teaching, of ancient history has been expunged from our vocabulary. Even more to the point, the phrase "ancient history" has become a term of derision...

The latest Democratic game plan. "We Can't Just Call Him a Liar"? Why do I suspect the willpower will fail just when they need it most?

Pictures of Peace

Remember the quote from Pastor Niemoller on the holocaust?

First They Came for the Jews

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

This is what it looks like in Turkey today after the synagogue bombings that seem to have once again killed more Muslims than Jews or Americans. At least there is some evidence the Turks may get it:

A shopkeeper near the site of one of the explosions had this to say:

"Muslim, Christian, Jewish, people are people. Today it's them, tomorrow it could be me."

It's a worldwide civil war folks -- both within the Muslim world and within the West. Those who cynically mouth words of condolences at attacks on peaceful people -- much less relief organizations -- while secretly harboring hatred and ill wishes for the West need only look in the mirror to see what corruption looks like...

No Evidence? Really?

WHOOPS!

And here's a summary if you don't have stamina to read it all. BUT YOU SHOULD! The most enjoyable commented version is here. (Hat tip Instapundit.)

And don't forget "No Evidence?"...

Borking X-rayed.

And then there's ol' laser-beam with a wicked pen Lileks -- enjoy!

I'm Norwegian, but close enough. Why I'm glad my Grand-daddies got on those boats! (As Muhammed Ali would say...)

Why They Call Him Spock, Redux

Stephen Den Beste cuts to the bone on our gulf with Bin Laden:

And that's why al Qaeda's plans seem idiotic to rationalists like Donald and me. bin Laden could not create and follow the kind of plan which we'd think was essential. If bin Laden's plan had been based entirely on temporal power and cogent strategy and real resources, and if such a plan did not rely on miracles, it would have demonstrated lack of faith. If there were no place in the plan for God, it would prove that bin Laden didn't truly believe God would help.

And it would therefore prove that bin Laden didn't deserve any help from God, because it would prove that his faith wasn't really pure. For bin Laden to create such a plan would be a heretical act.

Of course that entire issue is meaningless for an Atheist.

It isn't meaningless for a rationalist post-Enlightenment Christian, but he faces no crisis of faith in a similar situation. He can make rational plans which don't rely on miracles because his faith acknowledges that God doesn't usually work that way. Such a Christian doesn't pray for victory; he prays for the wisdom to create rational plans and the strength to carry them out.

But for bin Laden and other Islamic zealots bent on jihad, even that would be heresy. The only way to truly prove your faith is to rely on miracles, and that's what I think they're doing. I think that was bin Laden's strategy.

It's not enough for them to win or lose their crusade; they have to win it the right way, by showing the purity of their faith and by having God fight beside them. And they only can, and only should win by purifying themselves enough to once again deserve God's aid in the crusade. To demonstrate any doubt whatever in this is to prove that they are unworthy to be Soldiers of God.

And God will prove that by not aiding them, and permitting their enemies to triumph. [Emphasis added.]

The thing that amazes me about so many libs is their inability to discern this kind of stuff ... READ THE WHOLE THING. PERIOD.

And Mr. Totten weighs in with a beautiful round-house left (or was that a right?) on the jaw of Delay and crew. Nicely done!

(I sense heart palpitations in the readership. Heaven forfend -- an attack on the right in a running dog right-wing blog?)

Oh, brother -- Andrew is just rolling, rolling, rolling today ;)

Churchill again, more right than he knew again... in perpetuity... one more time... and not likely to be the last... count on it...

UPDATE: and again...

From the "When a man tells you that he intends to kill you ... believe him" De-nihilism File

The latest from the folks who only want to kill the Jews and Americans and therefore destroyed the Buddist statues at Bamiyan: (I think there's actually some problem with that sentence -- now what, oh, what could it be???)

100,000 Deaths Expected in An Imminent Attack Against the U.S.

In regard to rumors about a large-scale attack against the U.S. during the month of Ramadan, Al-Hijazi said that "a huge and very courageous strike" will take place and that the number of infidels expected to be killed in this attack, according to primary estimates, exceeds 100,000. He added that he "anticipates, but will not swear, that the attack will happen during Ramadan." He further stated that the attack will be carried out in a way that will "amaze the world and turn Al-Qai'da into [an organization that] horrifies the world until the law of Allah is implemented, actually implemented, and not just in words, on His land... You wait and see that the balance of power between Al-Qai'da and its rivals will change, all of a sudden, Allah willing."

Regarding Al-Qai'da detainees, Al-Hijazi said: "We follow their situation closely... the collaborating governments will pay the price for capturing these heroes who want to revive the glory of their nation and shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace."

Al-Hijazi added that the "collaborating and treacherous" governments should know that Al-Qai'da has a long reach and its members enjoy popularity that will not end just because apostate governments detain hundreds of Al-Qai'da's members. "As soon as the governments detain one of our people, ten like him join us... this is no secret." [Emphasis added.]

Remember, the plan in WTC I was to topple one tower into the other with a goal of killing 250,000. Instead, the radical left laughs in racist condescension at these poor, hapless and oppressed Arabs. Apparently, the "horrifying" implementation of Sharia law is well within the bounds of rationality. Well, certainly MUCH preferable to those horrifying Christians and Jews and their hatefully repressive religions that brought us the enlightenment, democracy and scientific inquiry!

Ummm, this seems to need more research so it doesn't leak like a sieve...

Looking de-nihilism in the face -- this is why some call him Spock ... I just call him "The Best". (Good grief, of course there's a joke to be found in that comment -- surely you're adept enough to find it? It's not that hard -- I promise.)

Who is watching this as a neutral?

Darren Kaplan posts Christopher Hitchens' latest laser beam:

Since we're talking about our safety, I want to put a proposition to you," Hitchens said. "There's a tendency in these discussions, one which I very much reprobate, and one that I find a good deal in the New York Times, and also the Democratic Party, to watch this outcome as if to say, 'I wonder how it's going to work out? I wonder if Bush is going to win? I wonder if the Fedayeen Saddam or al-Qaida are going to? Some days it looks bad for one side, some days not so bad.'

"Who is daring to look at this as if they were a spectator? Who is watching this as a neutral?" [Emphasis added.]

Of course, that would be people who live in such a free country that they can literally do or say almost anything and get away with it -- all the while screaming in agony at their so-called persecution.

As my "No Kidding Sam..." post pointed out, even after WWII we didn't have our act together to even congeal a faint shadow of the punishment that should have been meeted out. If we couldn't even properly punish the Nazis then, it's almost beyond risible to claim that after more decades of swelling decadence we could meaningfully persecute the left-liberal establishment of our own society. In fact, Goebbels himself would smile at the "big lie" of using character assassination rather than rational argument against an opponent.

This is what it looked like from the master himself:

One could not understand this war if one did not always keep in mind the fact that International Jewry stands behind all the unnatural forces that our united enemies use to attempt to deceive the world and keep humanity in the dark. It is so to speak the mortar that holds the enemy coalition firmly together, despite its differences of class, ideology and interests. Capitalism and Bolshevism have the same Jewish roots, two branches of the same tree that in the end bear the same fruit.

Sound eerily familiar?

Today's Quote: "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." -- Winston Churchill

... unfortunately his enemies made sure nobody read it ... and if more of us had read it we'd actually have a clue ...

No Kidding Sam...

Another new Iraqi blog called Hammorabi by someone named Sam has this instructive post:

Lot of news coming from Iraq indicates that many of the Baath members from the previous regime appointed in important posts with the new ministries like the Ministry of Electricity and Educations.
Also some of the previous members of the secret police and inelegances like "Mokhabarat" appointed in new important positions.

We don't know what the new Ministers are doing and why there is no trials for those who committed genocides and crimes against the Iraqis and the Humanity.
S H [Emphasis added.]

My dear Sam, Iraq has more in common with World War II than people realize. For instance, check out this snippet from an article on the Nuremberg trials:

But Maguire notes that it wasn't just American isolationists who opposed Nuremberg. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas described the trials as legally unprincipled, while George Kennan dismissed efforts to re-educate Germans and said the entire tribunal should be terminated.

Amidst the criticism and red baiting, the subsequent American trials at Nuremberg concluded in 1949 with some 142 convictions. Twenty four Germans were sentenced to death and many others got prison terms. But they would not stay behind bars long. To appease West German leaders, American diplomats in command of the U.S. occupation zone formed a review board to consider clemencies.

The man who appointed the review board, John McCloy, stressed that the board was not reconsidering judgments but would examine fairness in sentences imposed by the tribunal. Many prosecutors suspected that politics were involved, though John McCloy always denied that he was acting on any political directives from Washington, according to prosecutors and historians.

"Between 1949 and 1958," says William Caming, "all of the prisoners had sentences reduced and were then released. Including, surprisingly enough, four of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. It was a political measure. No members of the prosecution staff and none of the judges at Nuremberg were even consulted." [Emphasis added.]

The similarities mount, don't they?

And yet more Deja Vu all over again...

Keith Burgess-Jackson is now blogging -- go visit!

An out and out 'steal' from OpinionJournal perfectly illustrates why Clark is a really bad, bad, bad choice to take on Bush over Iraq:

The Dems' Savior?
Attempting to explain why liberating Kosovo was a good idea but liberating Iraq was not, Wesley Clark, in an interview with The New Yorker, reaches new heights of incoherence:

In a speech at the University of Iowa College of Law, on September 19th, Clark had declared that chief among America's mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq without "the mantle of authority" bestowed by United Nations approval. But hadn't the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the U.N. Security Council? Yes, Clark allowed, and in that regard the Kosovo war was "technically illegal." He went on, "The Russians and the Chinese said they would both veto it. There was never a chance that it would be authorized."

That situation did not seem entirely dissimilar from the prewar maneuverings regarding Iraq, when France and Germany said that they would oppose any Security Council resolution authorizing an immediate war; Bush bypassed the U.N. and resorted to an alliance with Prime Minister Tony Blair's Britain and sundry lesser members of the "coalition of the willing." But there was one more important difference, Clark said: the war against Serbia was waged to stop the imminent threat of ethnic cleansing in the disputed province of Kosovo; the war in Iraq, he said, was waged under false pretenses.

Got that? It was OK to wage an "illegal" war in Kosovo because of an "imminent threat" not to America or its allies but to the civilian population there--as if Saddam Hussein didn't pose an imminent threat to Iraqis.

Oh brother! Iraq is way, way, way out in the lead in the modern "mass grave accomodations for its citizens" race and Saddam wasn't a threat to them? (Much less us who he publicly professed to hate!)

Thank You

Special thanks to my cousin Paul for his service in Vietnam and a posthumous thanks to my uncle Luther who served in North Africa and Italy in WWII. More thanks than I can ever say...

Darren Kaplan notes that Afghanistan has started a trend after all: "Al Qaeda Bombs the Saudis out of the Stone Age".

Realistic Alaa

Check out Alaa again today:

I heard that General Abi Zaid has been talking to the Elders and Community notables of the Western region. This is right, there are sensible people, they must be talked to, reasoned with and brought to their senses. This approach must be escalated at the same time as firmness against the terrorists increased. They are after all our compatriots and brothers, if they have grievances, let them air them. If they accept the New Iraq and equality, freedom, and democracy it is in their interests. There is plenty for everybody. This is destruction of their country too. And I tell you the majority are not for this wantonness, I mean the majority of these regions so called "the triangle". They are just being used and misled by people who have not the least interest in the future and wellbeing of the country. They must be won back.

So Olive branch in one hand, and Sharp Sword the other. That in my opinion is the best course.

Salaam

Alaa

[Emphasis added.] Hang in there bud! We need you -- and with clear thinking like that you can even teach us a thing or two...

Krauthammer's cookin':

Sympathy is fine. But if we "squander" it when we go to war to avenge our dead and prevent the next crop of dead, then to hell with sympathy. The fact is that the world hates us for our wealth, our success, our power. They hate us into incoherence. The Europeans, Ajami astutely observes, disdain us for our excessive religiosity (manifest, they imagine, by evolution being expelled from schools while prayer is ushered back in)--while the Arab world despises us as purveyors of secularism. We cannot win for losing. We are widely reviled as enemies of Islam, yet in the 1990s we engaged three times in combat -- in the Persian Gulf and in the Balkans -- to rescue Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo, Muslim peoples all. And in the last two cases, there was nothing in it for the U.S.; it was humanitarianism and good international citizenship of the highest order.

The search for logic in anti-Americanism is fruitless. It is in the air the world breathes. Its roots are envy and self-loathing -- by peoples who, yearning for modernity but having failed at it, find their one satisfaction in despising modernity's great exemplar.

On Sept. 11, they gave it a rest for a day. Big deal. [Emphasis added.]

Any questions? Ayn Rand rests quite comfortably in her grave -- she didn't miss the mark...

A Gem On Military Reality in Iraq

If you can't read the whole thing then you should at least scan and hop around in it! Well worth it... (Hat tip Winds of Change.)

A Bodyguard Quote: "Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind". And research project -- it should be easy for you to figure out who said it, no?

Overdue Pointer: "The Story of This War"

Interestingly, "The Story of This War" was published the same day as Bush's speech. It's a follow-up to "The Six Dilemmas of a Moderate Islamist" -- and a nice tie-in to my note to the Mesopotamian. Gotta love all these "coincidences"...

Go get your OD of semiotics, take two aspirin and don't call me in the morning ;)

Havel On Western Leftist Hypocrisy

You wonder why Havel is out of step with the West's coddled and insular leftists? Try this choice little comment regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 80s:

"How much trust or even admiration for the Western peace movement can we expect from a simple yet sensitive citizen of Eastern Europe when he has noticed that this movement has never, at any of its congresses or at demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of participants, got around to protesting the fact that five years ago, one important European country attacked a small neutral neighbor and since that time has been conducting on its territory a war of extermination which has already claimed a million dead and three million refugees? Seriously, what are we to think of a peace movement, a European peace movement, which is virtually unaware of the only war being conducted today by a European state? As for the argument that the victims of aggression and their defenders enjoy the sympathies of Western establishments and so are not worthy of support from the left, such incredible ideological opportunism can provoke only one reaction -- utter disgust and a sense of limitless hopelessness." [Emphasis added.]

Sounds eerily familiar doesn't it? 300,000 mass graves and counting anyone??? But of course, personal animus has never driven the left -- or have I missed something? AND IT JUST GOT ADDED TO THE CLASSICS OVER ON THE RIGHT.

I Liked His Enthusiasm So Much ...

that I wrote a letter to Alaa:

Alaa,

Hang in there. You and Zayed are doing a great job!

Unfortunately, we in the West are experiencing something of a civil war ourselves. I apologize for both our leftists and rightists. They both let your suffering go on far too long and then when 300,000 mass graves are discerned, it's primarily only those on the right who start to get it. The left is too busy trying to twist it in some way to hurt Bush to care much about you. (It's pretty impressive how rampant Bush-hatred is in the Democratic Party.)

The irony is that we actually do have the talent to win the propaganda war, but most of that talent is on the left (a long story why but more true than I care to admit) and is sleeplessly focused on defeating Bush instead of actually putting their talent to positive use in the world.

I have also been suspicious all along of the bureacracy and incompetence of the CPA. The irony there is that given the freedom our country achieved before "big government" came into being in the middle of the last century, we have actually been somewhat content to accept this level of incompetence. It's a sort of "warehousing" of our incompetents -- most (not all of course!) of our really smart people are in the private sector, not the government bureaucracy. And the private sector is where our good "quality of life" stems from primarily.

I have linked you on my blog and will do all I can to support your cause!

My apologies for this mess and my pledge to do what I can,
Bob Gronlund

UPDATE: A very interesting comment I found on Alaa's blog:

I have faith in the Iraqi people. Six thousand years of history, the first written laws, the first writing, I don't think the first democracy in the Middle East is so farfetched.

And I would add the removal of their throats -- however tentatively -- from under one of the most horrific "metal boots" in the history of the planet! Why do you think the Eastern Europeans "got it" about Iraq far more than the Western Europeans? Could it be because they too know the clank of the metal boot? Check out Vaclav Havel for instance...

Promising New Iraqi Blog

Read it and weep:

Al Jazira, Al Arabiya and the like are still, after six months of the fall of the idol, the main sources of information in the country. The G.C. members, all accomplished speakers and orators, hardly talk to the people. They might appear occasionaly on the arab channels.

This is far more dangerous than what you think. These channels are almost directing operations of "insurgency". For instance, as soon as some information is broadcast about oil being pumped on a certain line, you can be certain it is sabotaged the next day, not to mention showing tapes from Saddam, Bin Laden, and various "resistance groups" colorfully poising for the photo holding their RPJ's and threatening every body with death and damnation. Even their method of reporting is highly subversive. For example: When IP stations are attacked, the reporter never fails to add that this is done because these are "collaborators".

An Iraqi Sattelite Station must immediately be started, and all the talented well known Iraqis who are eminently capable to run it and counter attack this massive propaganda campaign by the enemy, recalled and recruited. The Station should beam long hours and compete effectively and present the information in the flamboyant and spicy style appropriate to the mass taste of the iraqi populace. [Emphasis added.]

(Hat tip to Totten.) More illustration that our ossified bureaucracies are risibly incompetent at anything resembling a battle for hearts and minds.

Adding the Belmont Club to my links -- interesting stuff...

TODAY'S REMINDER: A holocaust survivor was asked what one lesson he had learned from those horrific events. His simple reply -- "When a man tells you that he intends to kill you ... believe him.".

Today the Israelis proved to the world that they did not learn anything from the Holocaust and are not committed to their own survival by agreeing to a hostage trade with a terrorist organization that is blatantly and loudly dedicated to the destruction of the Israeli state.

Oh, and did I mention that Hizb'Allah have the blood of at least 241 American soldiers on their hands? It's just laughable that Reagan is considered a hateful warmonger by the left when he didn't even do anything to fight back against the Marine barracks atrocity.

You may wonder why the name Mughniyah keeps popping up on this blog -- here's a summary:

Whenever someone says Hezbolla, remember this name: Imad Mughniyah- this man, and remember his name, is the head of Hezbollah's terror operations. He has a $25 million price on his head; he should, he is the most skilled terror operative in the world. Mughniyah murdered Robert Steatham on flight 847 and was the planner of a bombing attack that killed 241 US marines.

And I'll be greatly surprised if he doesn't turn out to be behind many of the largest atrocities in Iraq as well...

The other speech that day is not that long and you should read it.

Interesting panel this morning on Stephanopoulos' "thisweek" included Zacharia, Will, Perle and Holbrook. Good discussion and reasonably balanced and civil. They ended the program talking about the difficulty of building democracy in Iraq and Will pointed out analogously -- by way of illustrating the perilousness and long-term nature of the situation -- that we're still not done reforming Mississippi [in so many words].

Perle got the closing point in on the discussion: "It took a long time to reform Mississippi -- it took a war to free the slaves".

Then there's the most interesting parallel to this little meander in the discussion that drifted off into slavery: "Slavery is part of Islam". Read it and weep ... Abe Lincoln also took a "world-historical" gamble with the civil war -- he didn't have to do it and took massive grief and second guessing right up until final victory...

Just got around to reading Kagan's "Of Paradise and Power" which is primarily focused on the modern American / European relationship and how we got here. I should have promoted it in my stack a while ago. It's very much in the tradition of Aron and Bruckner. Very powerful and insightful -- probably the best book I've read this year! Watch for some killer references to start popping up...

More later...